MCB is delighted to join faculty from UCSF, Stanford, and other UC Berkeley departments in cutting-edge biomedical research funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Intercampus Research Awards! The Biohub will provide $13.7 million toward several collaborative research projects in labs around the Bay Area.

"Teaching undergraduates is part of the academic commitment for many neuroscience faculty. While some scientists view this as a major distraction from research, teaching is of high value, both in training young scientists and for informing one’s own scientific investigations."

A new paper from the lab of MCB Professors Georjana Barnes and David Drubin details the use of a cell-free assay in budding yeast lysates to reconstitute microtubule regulation.

The research demonstrates that the cell division cycle and the activities of specific MAPs (microtubule-associated proteins) affect both microtubule polymerization and dynamic instability (the stochastic growth and shrinkage of microtubules that are necessary for cell functioning and division).

We had a fantastic weekend in Asilomar, CA, for our annual MCB Cell & Developmental Biology retreat. Thank you to David Drubin and Matt Welch for the photos, and to Diana Bautista and David Bilder for organizing such a successful event!

Congratulations to the 2018 class of HHMI Hanna Gray Fellows, including MCB PhD alums Carolyn Elya, Jeannette Tenthorey, and Arielle Woznica, as well as current MCB Postdoc Sara Campbell!

The Hanna Gray Fellowship is designed to support exceptional early career researchers from a diverse set of backgrounds. Fellows receive mentorship from the HHMI community and research funding for 8 years throughout their postdoctoral research and into a tenure-track faculty position.

MCB & Chemistry Professor and HHMI Investigator Jennifer Doudna has been awarded the 2018 Pearl Meister Greengard Prize by The Rockefeller University. The prize honors women in biology who have made outstanding and revolutionary contributions to their field. Congratulations, Professor Doudna!

A groundbreaking new study from the labs of MCB Professors Michael Rape and Richard Harland describes a quality control pathway, called DQC (dimerization quality control), for regulators of the BTB family. DQC removes BTB dimers of abberant composition from interrupting signal transduction in a cell.

A team of researchers led by MCB Professor Daniel Portnoy has discovered that many bacteria in the human gut microbiome, such as the species which cause listeriosis and gangrene, produce electricity as part of their metabolic processes.

MCB Professor David Raulet, Univ. of Ottawa & Ottawa Hospital's Michele Ardolino and their colleagues' paper in The Journal of Clinical Investigationdescribes the important role Natural Killer (NK) cells may play in targeting tumors when combined with cancer immunotherapy drugs called checkpoint inhibitors.

They are currently investigating approaches to further enhance the cancer-killing ability of NK cells, and hope to someday profile how an individual's immune system interacts with their cancer, enabling more personalized immunotherapy treatments.

Congratulations to MCB Professor Matt Welch, who was recently named one of 13 new ASCB Fellows! This fellowship recognizes those in the field of cell biology who have exhibited a career-long commitment to the mission of the ASCB.

Professor Welch and the twelve other new Fellows will be recognized at the ASCB|EMBO Meeting in December 2018 in San Diego.

MCB Assistant Professor Eunyoung Park was named a 2018 Vallee Scholar by the Vallee Foundation, which awards $300,000 research grants to exceptional early career researchers and investigators. Assistant Professor Park's research focuses on the molecular mechanisms of protein translocation across cell membranes.

New research from the lab of MCB Assistant Professor Polina Lishko describes how flagellar regulatory nanodomains of human sperm are critical to sperm fertility. Hv1 proton channels in those nanodomains are distributed asymmetrically along bilateral flagellar lines to provide the structural basis for flagellar rotation.

The research was published this week in Cell Reports and is a collaboration between the Lishko lab and the lab of Ke Xu, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry.

The Department of Molecular and Cell Biology (MCB) at the University of California, Berkeley seeks candidates for a new position, Professor in Molecular & Cell Biology and Chief Scientific Director of the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI). The expected start date is July 1, 2019.

A team of researchers led by MCB Associate Professor David Savage has designed a novel protein engineering method known as MISER, which slims down the CRISPR-Cas9 protein.

A standard Cas9 protein is composed of 1,368 amino acids and is too large for many biomedical applications. By reducing the size of Cas9 proteins without sacrificing their core features, Savage and his team hope to pave the way to even more CRISPR-based therapies in the future.